Front-loading your headlines with your topic word just makes sense if your readers are going to encounter those headlines in online lists — a search engine results page, for instance, or your online newsroom.

That’s because readers look at only the first two or three words of the headline when scanning lists (Rev Up Readership members only; join Rev Up Readership). This technique is so important that usability expert Jakob Nielsen ranks it the No. 1 thing you can do to improve the ROI of your website.

But what’s the topic?

Too many communicators (and, let’s be honest, their reviewers) believe that the company or its product or service is the topic. But the real topic is the reader or what they reader can do, as these Silver Anvil Award-winning headlines demonstrate:

Blood Cancer Patients and Advocates Visit Capitol Hill to Inspire Continued Support for Be the Match

July 18 Legislative Day event aimed at delivering more cures to patients in need

— Be the Match Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

Teens Get Opportunity to Celebrate With an Idol

State Farm and Grammy Award Winner Kelly Clarkson team up for teen driver safety

— State Farm Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

Parents and teen drivers dangerously disconnected

New State Farm survey reveals an alarming gap between parents’ and teens views on driver safety licensing laws

— State Farm Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

Color Your Easter with Eggs

HGTV Interior Designer Sabrina Soto Offers Easter Decorating Tips to “Dye” for

— Edelman and The Egg Board Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

Before spring planting, expert says, “Dig a little. Learn a lot.”

— Natural Resources Conservation Service Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

Cover Crop Mixes — They Just Work Better

— Natural Resources Conservation Service Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

Survey: Cover crops deliver strong harvest amid drought

Agency focuses on helping farmers build resilient farms through soil health

— Natural Resources Conservation Service Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

JOIN THE TEEN DRIVER SAFETY CELEBRATION SUPPORTING NEW DRIVERS

Communities commit to drive safe in support of new drivers during National Teen Driver Safety Week

— State Farm Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign

Hey! Even the IRS is getting in on this approach. Here’s a recent newsletter headline:

10 Million Taxpayers Face an Estimated Tax Penalty Each Year; Act Now to Reduce or Avoid it for 2017; New Web Page Can Help

Don’t write about us and our stuff. To catch your reader, write about the reader and the reader’s needs.

The post Best press release headlines focus on readers appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Paint a picture in your lead through description like this, from a Pfizer Animal Health release.

Description makes a great approach for a PR lead. Here, Silver Anvil Award-winning PR pros show how it’s done.

‘Thick with the smell of fast food …’

This lead helped win support for the nation’s first statewide menu labeling law, sponsored by the California Center for Public Health Advocacy:

‘Tongs and spatulas flew …’

PR pros for PAM used description for this Silver Anvil winner:

Most obsolete office …

Xerox relied on description to show what the “most obsolete office” in America looks like in this Silver Anvil-winning press release lead:

Belligerent driving…

Nerves of Steel, a coalition of steel producers, leads by describing belligerent driving in this Silver Anvil-winning release:

Next steps

Learn how to add description to your copy.

The post Set the scene in press release leads appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Call her a preditor.

Elisa Lagos was an Edward R. Murrow and Peabody award-winning TV producer for ABC News.

Make that editor.

Make that both.

Elisa, now a communications associate at World Education Services, wasn’t alone doing double duty at ABC. In fact, many broadcasters now have two, two, TWO jobs in one.

Here’s how reporters’ lives have changed in the last few years:

• Three in 10 journalists are gone. Employment has sunk 30% since 2002, according to Pew’s “State of the News Media” study. Now journalists look to their left, and there’s nobody there. Fewer hands means more work for the remaining staff.
• Their jobs are expanding. Nearly six in 10 journalists surveyed by PWR New Media have added web work to their existing responsibilities. They’re not just reporting, they’re also writing social media posts, producing the infographic and making the video.
• There’s no letting up. The news cycle? 24/7. The news hole? Infinite.
• It’s tough out there. No wonder nearly seven out of 10 journalists believe their jobs have gotten harder over the past five years, according to a survey by media platform ISEBOX.

This problem will only grow worse. I had lunch recently with a friend from The New York Times. Every day, he told me, he looks around at his colleagues and asks, “How can the Times afford to keep paying all of these salaries?”

How can you help?

How can public relations professionals take advantage of — wait, I mean help — given this sad situation? (Hey, we can be preditory, too, right?)

1. Write releases that are ready to be read.

Half of the journalists in the ISEBOX study produce at least five articles a week. One in five produce more than 11 articles a week. A well-written press release can help these tired, busy professionals do their jobs better and more easily.

But instead of the hierarchical blurtation of facts that makes up most releases, why not write a story? A real story, that’s ready for publication. It takes great writing skills to write something your target audience wants to read, but it can be worth it.

Best-case scenario: You’ll convince a reporter that there’s a story here, worthy of pursuing. Worst case: A busy journalist publishes the release as is.

“We found official press releases often appear word for word in first accounts of events, though often not noted as such,” according to the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

2. Make it easy on the journalist (and the reader).

Write a one-minute release. Make it easy to scan with display copy, such as subheads, bullets and bold-faced lead-ins. Produce finished, publication-worthy written communications.

3. Deliver the goods.

Include the infographics, images, videos and other news assets journalists need to do all of their jobs.

In other words, become a preditor yourself.

The post Importance of writing in public relations? appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Are you still using the fact pack — cramming who, what, when, where, why and how into the first paragraph of your news release? Are you still married to the dated “XYZ Company today announced …” approach?

These conventional formulas to release leads are formulaic, old-fashioned and — let’s face it — dull. Both approaches slow the story down, appear unsophisticated and are too stereotypical to stand out from the competition.

Instead, choose from these three more effective approaches.

1. Benefits leads

Launching a new product or service? Focus on how it solves customer problems instead of on the product or service itself with this model, which I developed for my clients:

Here’s how it looks in action:

2. News leads

Do you have news to report? Instead of covering the five W’s and the H, appeal to reader interest by leading with the two most interesting elements to readers:

• What — as in “What happened?”
• Why — as in “Why should I care?”

Here’s how it works:

3. Feature leads

Feature leads show instead of tell. They attract readers by illustrating your key message instead of just stating it. Feature lead approaches include:

Description. This lead helped win support for the nation’s first statewide menu labeling law, in a Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign by the California Center for Public Health Advocacy:

Startling statistics, like this lead from a Silver Anvil Award-winning campaign by Visa:

Compression of details, as in this lead for an H&R Block survey story by Fleishman Hillard’s John Armato:

Other feature lead approaches include anecdote, analogy, wordplay, concrete details, human interest and examples.

Surprise and delight your readers.

Whichever approach you use, write a lead that appeals to your readers’ self interest or that makes your story interesting.

Can’t do that with a fact pack.

The post 3 types of press release lead paragraphs to try appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

When PR pros at Toyota American Motor Sales needed to announce record-level production recently, they started with a traditional announcement release:

But after a writing workshop with yours truly, those same PR pros came up with this feature approach:

Features first

Why feature releases?

• Features increase reading and satisfaction, according to recent studies.
• On the other hand, research shows that inverted pyramids “do not work well with readers.”
• More than half of business-to-business editors seek more feature releases, including case studies and how-to stories, according to a survey by Thomas Rankin Associates.
• No wonder the Associated Press now offers feature leads with all the stories it sends across the wire.

Features at Toyota

Features have been generating results at Toyota, too. Take a package of feature releases about Yellowstone (“Buffalo and Bears and Batteries – Oh My!” and “Yellowstone … Where the Deer and the Antelope and the Prius Play”).

“We’ve had almost 1,100 unique page views of the battery story and about 850 unique page views for the background story, both much higher than average,” says Brin Wall, writer at Toyota Motor Sales.

“Time spent on both was longer than average for our site, and the battery story was picked up by Motor Trend, Popular Science, Autoblog Green, Daily News and Automobile magazine, along with many ‘green’ outlets.”

Ready to take on a feature release yourself? Here are six ways to gain inspiration from some of Toyota’s recent feature releases.

1. Tell a story. “When you have news, report it. When you have a story, tell it.” Or so advises Poynter Institute senior scholar Roy Peter Clark. Instead of just reporting this news, Toyota PR pros told a story in this release.

2. Show drama. Is there conflict in your news? Make that the story, as Toyota PR pros did in this release:

3. Try human interest. Stumped for a lead? Look for the people behind the news, as Toyota PR pros did in this release:

4. Turn statistics into people. Write about people, not about statistics. Here’s how Toyota PR pros did it:

5. Use concrete details. Concrete details — the 42-pound CRT from 1997, the after-college futon — make this release lead creative. And turn numbers into things, as the PR pros at Toyota do in the last paragraph here.

6. Try wordplay. Alliteration, twists of phrase and plays on words — as in this release — grab reader attention:

Focus on features.

“What really helps get [releases] picked up is a great story,” says Toyota’s Wall. And a feature release can help you put your great story in the best light.

Take a tip from Toyota: Tackle a feature release.

The post How to structure a press release appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..

Seventy-one percent of high-performing organizations focus their messaging on audience’s point of view. Just 45% of average organizations do.

Or so says Stephen Welch, president of IABC UK and an independent consultant.

Welch worked with Michael Ambjorn, director-at-large at NearDesk, to develop a benchmarking database that correlates communication practices with organizational performance. They looked at 81 organizations with some 390,000 employees across 10 countries.

High-performing organizations communicate better.

In the study, Welch and Ambjorn learned that high-performing organizations are:

• 60% more likely to think about communication from the audience perspective. Five in eight high-performing organizations say they like to talk about themselves; seven in eight average organizations do.
• Twice as likely to make emotional connections to their audiences.
• 40% more likely to limit the number of messages in their communications. Average organizations are more likely to pack a lot of messages into their pieces.
• Twice as likely to keep language simple and jargon-free. Only 21% of average organizations say they keep their language simple and jargon-free, compared to half of high-performing organizations.
• 80% more likely to have a process for creating great corporate stories.

Are you on an SOS team?

Half of organizations say that senior executives generally devise corporate messages. However, only 20% of benchmarked organizations think their leaders are good at communicating.

This approach turns some communications departments into SOS — “Send Out Stuff” — teams. But perhaps that’s best.

Only half of communicators surveyed said they align their work to corporate strategy and goals. And only a third ranked their level of business know-how and understanding high.

“Two-thirds of communicators,” Welch writes, “need to improve their business understanding if they want to advise business people.”

The post Top organizations use reader-centric approach appeared first on Wylie Communications, Inc..